Offering Up An Even Dozen Odds and Ends

By JOSEPH NOCERA

Published: December 24, 2005

YOU know those columns sportswriters dash off as they're heading to vacation -- the ones that start with ''thoughts while cleaning up my desk?'' I wonder what a business version of that kind of column would be like

Stephen M. Case has every right, I suppose, to call for Time Warner to be broken into pieces, and for his old company, AOL, to be ''liberated,'' as he put it in The Washington Post recently. But wouldn't he have a little more credibility if he could just bring himself to say he was sorry? After all, it was Mr. Case, along with Gerald M. Levin, the former Time Warner chief executive, who put together what soon became the merger from hell.

The closest Mr. Case has come to apologizing was in an online chat that came after his Post op-ed, in which he said: ''I think it suffered from a lack of leadership, including from me.'' In the next breath, however, he took himself off the hook: ''It is hard to push for strategic moves, when none of the businesses report to you,'' he whined Now that I mention it, has Mr. Levin ever apologized for his role in bringing about the dumbest merger of the modern age? I must have missed it.

James J. Cramer has been my friend for 20 years, but I cringe when I watch his frenetic new show, ''Mad Money.'' In talking to Mr. Cramer about the show, I get the impression that he's thrilled to have finally been given an outlet that allows him to unleash his inner stock picker, but I find it's like watching ''Curb Your Enthusiasm '' -- it's just too excruciating to bear. For one thing, should the Cramer methodology -- ''Buy! Sell! Buy! Sell! Buy! Sell!''-- really be a guide for the rest of us? And for another, as someone put it to me recently, ''I keep expecting him to bite the head off a chicken.''

Whenever I read another article about how the Google guys walk on water, I think: Pride cometh before the fall

Christopher Cox is proof of the pointlessness of trying to predict how someone will take to a new job. All the talk about how he would be a tool of the business lobby as the new Securities and Exchange Commission chairman has turned out to be wrong. Mr. Cox has backed even the most reviled of his predecessor's initiatives, including rules requiring independent chairmen for mutual funds, as well as hedge fund registration, which goes into effect in February. I loved his recent line to Fortune: ''It had never occurred to me that being a Republican required that you couldn't be for law and order.'' The real test, though, will come once he finishes carrying out the agenda of the former chairman, William H. Donaldson, and begins setting his own.

Speaking of hedge fund registration -- what is the big deal? Investment advisers and mutual funds have to register with the S.E.C. Why shouldn't hedge funds, which have grown to more than $1 trillion in assets and clearly have the power to both move markets and press companies to change? The new rule will finally allow the S.E.C. to conduct periodic audits of hedge funds, but it also includes a ridiculously big loophole, exempting any hedge fund that locks up investors' money for two years or more.

Hedge fund managers fear that the commission isn't sophisticated enough to understand their complex trading strategies. They also don't like the idea of having to submit to audits and worry that registration would lead to out-and-out regulation. But the mutual fund business does just fine with the S.E.C. looking over its shoulder, and hedge funds will, too. Secrecy is the Achilles' heel of the hedge fund industry. It's scary that nobody knows what hedge funds are doing, or how much they are leveraged; it conjures up visions of Long-Term Capital Management, which put a huge scare into the financial system when it blew up in the late 1990's.

Registration would be the first step toward easing that fear. Hedge fund managers need to understand that as they push to become a mainstream part of institutional investing -- used not just by clever endowment managers but also by plain-vanilla pension funds -- they need oversight. Otherwise, they will remain what they are today: the world's best-paying cottage industry.

Wouldn't it be nice to see, just once, a photograph of Steven P. Jobs, Apple's chief executive, in a business magazine in which he is not holding one of his company's hot new products? It almost never happens anymore. These days, he shows up at photo shoots, product in hand, and threatens to walk off the set if the photographer dares ask him to put it down. For a guy who thinks of himself as a business artiste, Mr. Jobs sure seems to have the soul of a huckster

The thing I most don't understand about the lunatic goings-on at Overstock.com is why the chairman doesn't just tell the chief executive to put a sock in it. Patrick M. Byrne, the C.E.O., has spent months publicly conjuring a conspiracy against his company -- including ''crooked'' reporters, ''naked'' short sellers and an unnamed ''Sith Lord'' pulling the puppet strings -- that only Oliver Stone could love. The chairman of Overstock is Warren E. Buffett's buddy John J. Byrne, the former chairman of Geico, who just happens to be Patrick's father. Never has a father-son talk been needed so badly. Given the state of Overstock's floundering business, the younger Mr. Byrne would be far better served minding the store than posting his rantings on the Motley Fool message board. Otherwise, there's not going to be a store to mind much longer.